Thursday, August 30, 2012

Statistics: The world population reached 7 billion

It took until 1804 for the world's population to reach the one billion mark, but only a further 123 years to reach two billion in 1927. Population rise during the 20th century really took off. By 1960, three billion had been reached, but within 14 years, in 1974, the total had reached four billion.

The world population has now reached 7 billion people. This milestone inspired us to conduct research to update our statistics, and the changes over the past 5 years are remarkable.

The United States Census Bureau (USCB) estimates that by 2027 eight billion people will live on the planet, with the nine billionth mark being reached in 2046.

In 2006, only 1 person out of 100 would have had a college education-- today that number has jumped to 7 thanks in part to advances in higher education in Asia. The detailed research and source information can be found here and the statistics provided by Donella Meadows in 1990 that originally inspired our project can be viewed here.

If the World were 100 PEOPLE:
50 would be female
50 would be male

26 would be children

There would be 74 adults,
8 of whom would be 65 and older

There would be:

60 Asians
15 Africans
14 people from the Americas
11 Europeans

33 Christians

22 Muslims
14 Hindus
7 Buddhists
12 people who practice other religions
12 people who would not be aligned with a religion

12 would speak Chinese

5 would speak Spanish
5 would speak English
3 would speak Arabic
3 would speak Hindi
3 would speak Bengali
3 would speak Portuguese
2 would speak Russian
2 would speak Japanese
62 would speak other languages

83 would be able to read and write; 17 would not


7 would have a college degree

22 would own or share a computer

77 people would have a place to shelter them

from the wind and the rain, but 23 would not

1 would be dying of starvation

15 would be undernourished
21 would be overweight

87 would have access to safe drinking water

13 people would have no clean, safe water to drink


Sources: 2012 - Fritz Erickson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Ferris State University

0 comments:

Post a Comment